Small Business Administration

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has developed a shared vision, which includes transitioning its employees from making and servicing loans to primarily reaching out to new markets and overseeing its private-sector partners. SBA has also begun to take steps to better manage its human capital activities, including workforce planning efforts. More needs to be done, however, including (1) completing its efforts to identify the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics its employees will need to perform successfully in SBA's new business environment; (2) estimating the number of employees with those skills who will be needed; (3) developing a succession plan for senior leaders and reinstating candidate development programs for these leaders; and (4) ensuring that employees receive adequate training to perform their jobs well. Although SBA plans to develop a workforce transformation plan by October 2000, it could take years to fully implement it.

GAO noted that: (1) designing, implementing, and maintaining effective human capital strategies will be critical for agencies to maximize their performance; (2) agencies need a strategic approach to managing their human capital activities to ensure that they give the management of their most important asset--their employees--the high priority they deserve; (3) this is especially important in light of limited budgets; (4) SBA, for example, has undertaken a number of initiatives for better managing its human capital activities, including developing competency models and related training for some core functions and realigning and deploying some staff; (5) however, these initiatives were not centrally coordinated until recently, and SBA is just developing an overall plan to guide the agency's human capital efforts; (6) the human capital initiatives SBA has undertaken, while useful, are incomplete; (7) consequently, the success of the agency's attempt to redesign its business processes and transform its workforce is potentially at risk; (8) for example, the agency has not finished identifying the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics that its staff will need to perform the core functions SBA has identified as key to its new business processes; (9) in addition, SBA's lack of succession planning could endanger the leadership continuity, institutional knowledge, and expertise that are critical for the successful transformation of the agency's workforce; (10) further, a smaller percentage of SBA staff report that they have been adequately trained for their jobs than staff in the federal government generally or any other agency responding to recent surveys; (11) while GAO recognizes that SBA has plans to develop a workforce transformation plan by October 2000, the full implementation of such a plan could be several years away; and (12) sustained attention to these issues thus will be important as SBA continues to implement its new business processes and realign its human capital policies and practices to support those new processes.